Author: Gregory Pijanowski

Remagen

March 7th was the 70th anniversary of the capture of the Ludendorff Bridge crossing the Rhine River at Remagen. Hitler had ordered all the bridges across the Rhine to be demolished to stop the American advance into Germany. The U.S. Army 9th Infantry Division managed to capture the bridge while the German Army was attempting to blow it up.

Remagen
Ludendorff Bridge, 1945. Photo: National Archives.

General Omar Bradley said the bridge was worth its weight in gold as the American Army poured personal and equipment across the Rhine. In fact, so much tonnage crossed the bridge the overuse caused its collapse ten days later.  Twenty-eight were killed during the collapse which is described by Army Engineer John Morgado below.

The Third Reich would end exactly two months after the capture of the bridge.

Remagen Bridge Today
Ludendorff Bridge, 2011. Photo: Gregory Pijanowski

The bridge itself was never rebuilt.  However, the remaining bridge towers are now home to the Remagen Peace Museum. I highly recommend a visit if you find yourself in that region of Germany. Remagen is now a peaceful river town and it is difficult to image all the violence that took place there seventy years ago. However, sitting on a bench on the riverside by the bridge allows one to quietly reflect on the events there that helped end one of the most hideous chapters in human history.

Winter and Global Warming

February clocked out as the coldest month in Buffalo history at 10.90 F. Besides the grumbling about dead car batteries, heating bills, and snow-clogged streets, there are the usual doubts about global warming. In this kind of scenario, how does one address the topic with your students? For starters, do not be dismissive of their qualms. Your students are applying their life experience to reject the concept of global warming. As a teacher, you must utilize your student’s life experience to understand the concept that temperatures are rising globally even while they are shivering on the way to school locally.

The first step is to have a discussion session. The goals of this discussion should be two-fold. One is to expand the student’s perspective beyond a regional basis. Ask the students if they have ever vacationed in Florida during the Spring break. What other travel experiences have they had? Did they note a change in the weather when they traveled? It does not necessarily have to be very far. New York City and the East Coast can be significantly warmer than Buffalo, especially in the Spring.

The second set of questions in the discussion should be geared towards jarring your student’s memories to get a bigger picture on climate. In the case of Buffalo, students can be asked if they recall March of 2012. That month featured 8 days of 70 degree weather and 3 days over 80 degrees. When addressing the issue of climate change, it is important to pull your students out of the here and now. What is happening regionally cannot be extrapolated globally and what is happening now may very well be ephemeral in nature.

This sets the stage for an examination of weather vs. climate. Again, drawing upon a student’s interest may be helpful. If the student is a baseball fan, explain that a game box score is like weather and a batter’s career average is like climate. In the case of Derek Jeter, the 0 for 4’s, 2 for 5’s, 4 for 4’s that show up in the daily box scores is like weather. Jeter’s career average of .310 is like climate. One could take a look at Jeter’s game log from the 1999 season when he hit .349. Twenty-three times that year Jeter went 0-fer. Would one conclude from those games that Jeter was a poor hitter? Should one conclude from a few cold days the climate is not getting warmer or is a larger sample required?

Following this prep work, now is the time to delve into some inquiry based learning. Teaching in Buffalo, I would have the students graph out average annual temperature from 1950 to 2014 and add a moving 5-year average to smooth out the noise. The result is below:

Buff Temp

It is very important to stress this chart does not prove or disprove global warming as the sample size is too small. It is only intended to familiarize the students with the nature of climate vs. weather.

Again, a follow-up discussion with the class is required. What is the average annual temperature in Buffalo? What is the difference between the mean temperature and highest and lowest annual temperature? If the climate were to warm more than 40 F, how would that compare to the hottest year on record? How does 2014, which also featured a very cold winter, compare with other years on the chart? Is there a change in the variations in average temperature after 1980 and is that predicted at all by climate change theory?

Besides getting a feel for the nature of climate statistics, this exercise is intended to enable the class to discern between outliers and trends. Go back to the Jeter example; his 0-fers were outliers (unfortunately, for this Red Sox fan) and were not indicative of his overall hitting skills. This will come up time and time again as climate change contrarians make their case by using outliers. The most recent example is the expanding sea ice in Antarctica, which is a regional phenomenon as ice coverage is declining on the Antarctic continent, in the Arctic, and in mountain ranges around the globe.

At this point, the class should be prepared to deal with global climate. The NASA Climate Change website is an excellent resource for this (A word of caution, global temperatures use Celsius rather than Fahrenheit). The class can explore how the change in Buffalo matches or departs from global climate change. Does the post World War II dip in temperature match what happened globally? Why might that be the case? Does what happened after 1980 match? How about the brief dip in the early 1990’s? What might have caused that? Allow your students to construct their own knowledge of what is happening with the climate. The main objective for the teacher is to ensure the students are applying the Richard Feynman adage, nature will reveal itself to us as it is, not how we wish it to be.

Diversity

Many job postings for teaching positions have as a desired qualification the ability to teach a diverse student population. It is certainly understandable given the changing American demographics both now and in the upcoming decades.   What exactly should that qualification entail?

When presented with this issue in graduate school, many in my class had the first instinct to go with the role model route. That is, presenting students with a history of prominent individuals in the field that match the student’s background. My graduate adviser was quick to point out, that does nothing to help a student understand the subject material. And that, after all, is the main objective of a teacher.

As my adviser explained, the key to teaching a diverse class is to understand and integrate their life experiences into the course lesson plans. This places a premium on understanding the backgrounds of your students, preferably as the first order of business at the start of the course. By this, I mean more than a student’s racial background. You’ll want to understand a student’s life history and interests. Is the student from an urban or rural background? What are their personal interests and goals? Why are they taking the course?

In the Buffalo school system, there are many students from Somalia and Puerto Rico. Of course, most of the students are from Buffalo itself. How does one teach to a class with such a diverse background. An example of a possible lesson is below:

The seasons are dictated by the tilt of the Earth’s axis, which in turn, determines the angle of the Sun above the horizon. As an exercise, have the class calculate the amount of solar radiation received per square meter for Buffalo, San Juan, and Mogadishu on June 21 and December 21 at local Noon. Prior to the calculation, have the class discuss their personal experience of weather on those dates at those locations and make a prediction as to what the results of the calculations will be.

Using basic trig and a base unit of 1050 W/m2 of energy received by sunlight when the Sun is directly over head will yield the following results:

Energy per square meter at local Noon – watts per square meter         

City                 June 21                      December 21

Buffalo            990                             420

San Juan         1047                           783

Mogadishu     981                            945

Follow up questions for the class could be, does it surprise that Buffalo receives about the same amount of energy from the Sun on June 21 as Mogadishu? What does the energy difference between the three locations on those dates say about the seasonal changes and compare to the original class discussion.

Have the class find the average temperature for those cities on those dates and discuss the correlation. The students can use a planetarium program such as Starry Nights to see if any of the three cities experience a day when the Sun is directly overhead at local Noon. Keep in mind, this is a simplified model that does not account for variables such as cloud cover, but all scientific models make simplifications to arrive at the core of the issue.

This exercise, of course, should be tailored to fit the background of the specific class. The key point is to utilize the diversity of your class as an asset to the lesson plan.